Skwasjer,
Thanks for filling in the technical details.
:yeah:

As you stated above,
We'll need to do some Hex work here and there but nothing beyound
what most people could do if we explain it clearly.

Most of the work is going to be experimenting with the Crew Animations.
Finding the easiest and best ways to actually do them.

I think we have a good start on it all with S3D in the Tool Box.
:salute:

Good news : all operations on faces are allowed, add, delete and flip normals, as long as you don't touch the vertices.
This seems to be little but this will open the door to an another major breakthrough. But this is a different story...

We need to get a Standard Rig built for all Crew Animations.
I would suggest a scale of 1 Unit = 1 Meter.
Then scale the exports to SH3 size.

If all future Animators use a Standard Rig We all work on the same level.
And provide a Tool to help those that wish to do some animations
but can not build Rigs.

Hi divingbuefrog,

That is what we call excellent news indeed:up:

Best regards Hans

Hi privateer,

When i will be finish with my mod i will do such a rig i already have human rig from previous project i did so i would just have to modify it for our crew:salute:

I wish i had more spare time to heavily test those new things i can't wait to put my dirty 3d hand on it:up:

Best regards Hans

does "new animations" mean = "new crew models"?

:hmmm:

Hi urfisch,

So far the progress are slow but i think we could make it with perseverance nothing is impossible to dedicated people:up:

Best regards Hans

That is the final goal, Yes.
Animations of dock people and life boat people was done awhile ago.
That's pretty straight forwards.
Doing new Crew animations is a round about job.
Once started?
You have to do ALL animations, edit Keyframes and placement, etc.
It is a big job, Yes.
But nothing different from what Modders have ever done before
as far as the scope of the work load.

I need help.
The way materials and textures are applied in the bodyxx.dat and heads is a total mess! I can't find any logic in it...
Especially for the gat material (it means neck in romanian). It seems to have its own texture but I can't find where the data are stored.
Another point is in the Body02.dat. There is an embedded texture map that is lableled Map #83. I have no idea what this tag is referencing.
Any hint will be welcome.

ok, nice!

but is there a chance of an option, to import the animation keyframes automatically? if they are already done in a 3d programm?

Keyframe and Mesh animations are 2 different things.
The Crew animations use a combination of both.
I do not know if S3D will import a set Keyframe that does not match
an existing Keyframe thing?
In other words.
If there are 30 Keyframes and I want to import 50.
Will S3D do it?
:hmmm:
I never tried it as I use a different Tool to import KeyFrame stuff.

I cannot tell on english... :hmmm:
In game we have vertexes animation.
If to tell in other words in defined moments of time, we have certain vertexes positions of object...
It is possible to name as KeyFrames.
When i did animation (for example pennants or flags) in 3ds Max i used Snapshot Tool to get 100 meshes (vertexes positions of object) through certain quantity of time/frames. For example, full animation - 800 frames (speed = 25 FPS or other), selected Range = 243... 412 frames, Copies = 100, Clone method = Mesh... and result - 100 meshes (with different or not vertexes positions). Then import in dat-file using S3D (with calculating and adjusting time-step).

No, S3D does not understand any animation file format in itself.

For mesh animations (vertex/morph) as such you sortof 'render' specific static frames (OBJ) and then import those with S3D. The timeline does not have to be strictly fps bound though, because once in S3D you can adjust timings (albeit tedious compared to 3D studio). So if you have an animation that consists of 10 unique keyframes, but is stretched variantly accross a timeline, just import the 10 frames and adjust the timings in S3D for optimum performance.

For key framed animations that animate a single static mesh (like propellers, parts of guns), there's no import option all together. You import the one mesh, and then just play with the animation controller to adjust timings and positioning of the mesh.

S3D completely replaces the animation data. The frame count does not matter. Just keep in mind all the (customized) timings are lost in the process too (based on frame count and the timing settings when importing).

Quite by accident I have found a way to do this.
I've started useing a new Hex Editor that allows Custom Templates and Custom Scripts.

So one could create the needed Templates and/or Scripts to extract the information from a file, then add it to an SH3 .dat file.

It's roughly $50 U.S. paperbacks to buy for non-commercial work.
Not bad for a Tool that has unlimited uses in many areas.
I've seen several Games being Modded with this Editor already!